The Gift

He Traveled To Guanajuato To Deliver A Present And Came Back Enriched.

January 28, 1996|By THOMAS SWICK and Travel Editor

My room was dark in midafternoon, its single window traced on the outside with bougainvillea. I turned on the light and unpacked my bag, putting the present, neatly wrapped, on the low wooden shelf next to the TV.

Outside, the courtyard dripped with sunlight. I brushed past mysterious flowering vines and stepped into a rustic office, where a young Valentino took my key. I glanced at the open book on the counter: a history of the French Resistance.

Then down the hill, past the slanting tortilla cart and the open-air bakery and the black-haired schoolgirls making the long ascent home for the midday meal. There was a clear view, at one point, down into the city's newest tunnel, still being blasted, and out across the low-slung skyline. The dome of the university sat up among the square flat rooftops like a young woman's breast, a human, idealized reworking of the uneven line of mountains beyond. Guanajuato, I said to myself, gwana hwato. I am in gwana hwato.

It looked like a bottom, the quaintly lopsided Plaza de la Paz, with its neoclassical facades and self-important basilica. But at either side, streets still sloped. I took the left one, which dropped me into a dream: a tiny, triangular dollhouse of a plaza, with a bourgeois bandstand and two gurgling fountains wrapped inside a box of sculpted trees tied by a ribbon of patterned tiles. A slice of level greenness carved in the middle of an airtight town spilled in the lap of arid hills. The people strolling looked not the least bit amazed, the idle musicians poor and melancholic.

At one end, along the side of the Teatro Juarez, artists lingered by their paintings. I wandered through, looking more at the painters than their works, wondering if one of them was the person my present was for. But no one looked like a man named Howard.

--

At home, when I told people I was going to Guanajuato for a week, in the middle of Mexico, I got blank stares. The only person who knew something about the city, its once-rich silver mines, its heroic role in the War of Independence, was Lisa, who said: "I have a friend who lives there. He's an artist who moved there about 10 years ago. I have a couple of his paintings. I never met him but we corresponded for a few years." Before I left she gave me his address and a small present to pass on to him.

Howard, the last she had heard, was working as a librarian for the university. On Monday I made my way to El Truco Street, in the shadow of the basilica, and found the offices of the Direccion de Bibliotecas.

"Senor Goodrich?" a courier asked, overhearing my question to the receptionist. The name sounded odd in Spanish. Then he speed-spoke something else. I understood that Howard worked in another building, one this young man was headed to next, and that I was to follow him.

We snaked our way along narrow streets, pinned occasionally against brightly painted houses by Coca-Cola delivery trucks, and then turned into an open doorway. The silent courier crossed the courtyard, led me up an impressive staircase, entered a high-ceilinged room and pointed at a bald, wizened, bespectacled man reading at a cluttered desk. Senor Goodrich.

It took him awhile to adjust to my presence. When he did, he spoke haltingly, like someone unsure of his footing in English, and with helpless lapses into Spanish. The simplest inquiry - How are you doing? When can we meet? - took what seemed like a minute of painful reflection before an answer. Finally he suggested Saturday, the day before my departure, and asked me, the newcomer, where it should be.

--

Names of contacts always hold for me the glimmering promise of inclusion - the traveler's Grail. Contacts are strangers who, through the fieldwork of others, can become a knowledgeable guide, confidant, friend. They can open doors, dish you dirt, sometimes house and feed you. They can also be outsiders themselves.

It was clear, after my Monday morning visit, that I was going to be on my own in Guanajuato. Which, as it turned out, wasn't so bad. I joined the evening crowds rounding the triangle. An odd construct, I know, but no odder than the fact that everyone called this lovely plaza the "hardeen."Jardin. Has a word ever gone so disastrously from its written to its spoken form?

Here most evenings I saw the Expatriate, a tall, tweedy, white-maned American who shuffled around like a stately apparition. I met another American, Linda, who was learning Spanish and insisted that the best club in town was La Dama de las Camilias. At the symphony on Thursday I sat next to the beautiful wife of the first trumpet, who said I should not leave Mexico without visiting the ceramic artist Capelo in the nearby village of Valenciana.